Jon Stewart’s Charleston Despair

Stewart sounded tired and despairing, as if coming to terms with the fact that the nation’s most poisonous problems would outlast his ability to mock or rage against them.

On Thursday, two men known for their ability to inspire optimism in others seemed to have met the limits of their respective abilities.

In his opening monologue for “The Daily Show,” Jon Stewart, referring to the murder of nine congregants in their own church by a twenty-one-year-old young man who’d spent nearly an hour in their prayerful company before shooting them, said, “I didn’t do my job today. So I apologize. I’ve got nothing for you, in terms of jokes and sounds, because of what happened in South Carolina.” He’d been scribbling furiously on a piece of paper on the desk in front of him, looking away from the audience. “And maybe if I wasn’t nearing the end of the run, or this wasn’t such a common occurrence, maybe I could have pulled out of the spiral. But I didn’t. And so I honestly have nothing.”

Stewart is in the midst of his final month and a half on the air, and, just this week he expressed his delight at Donald Trump’s entry into the Presidential race by quipping, “A billionaire vanity candidate taking an escalator to the White House!,” before thanking Trump “for making my last six weeks my best six weeks.” The monologue matched his funniest and most exuberant ever, with Stewart using his full bag of tricks—putting on accents, mugging for the camera, his hands flying around in front of him. The laughter was supercharged by the reminder that this kind of thing was now finite, and someone else would have to get us through Election Day. The segment ended with Stewart, a giddy lame duck, faking an extended orgasm.

But, on Thursday night, Stewart sounded tired and despairing, as if coming to terms with the fact that the nation’s most poisonous problems would outlast his ability to mock or rage against them. That he would go and they might win. “We have to peer into the abyss of the depraved violence that we do to each other and the nexus of a gaping racial wound that will not heal yet we pretend doesn’t exist,” he said. It seemed for a moment that Stewart, who once hosted a rally in Washington to restore sanity and open-minded discourse to politics, would steer his audience toward some hopeful moment of zen. “I’m confident though, that by acknowledging it, by staring into that, and seeing it for what it is”—but then he paused for a few beats—“we still won’t do jackshit. Yeah, that’s us.”

Stewart’s monologue was, in several ways, a darker cousin to the remarks that President Obama had made during a press conference earlier in the day. “I’ve had to make statements like this too many times,” he said. He was talking about gun violence, and mass shootings, and how, compared to other ostensibly advanced nations, the United States was uniquely afflicted by this epidemic. Nine people dead, the shooter using a .45-calibre handgun that he’d reportedly been given by his father for his birthday. That’s us.

“And it is in our power to do something about it,” Obama continued. “I say that recognizing the politics in this town foreclose a lot of those avenues right now. But it would be wrong for us not to acknowledge it. And at some point it’s going to be important for the American people to come to grips with it, and for us to be able to shift how we think about the issue of gun violence collectively.”

This wasn’t like after Sandy Hook; you didn’t get the sense that the President was poised in the coming days to announce any new gun-control initiatives that would inevitably be swallowed up into the congressional maw, where, as Stewart and not the President might say, they’d do “jackshit” about it. This time, the President sounded angry and frustrated in much the same way that a private citizen might, at a loss to suggest a way forward. Before there might be legislation, the country would need to clear another, far more basic hurdle: simple acknowledgement that a problem—of gun violence, of racism—exists at all. But, like Stewart, Obama is nearing the end of his run, and his remarks, though they incorporated the oratory of Martin Luther King, Jr., and pointed toward a future of hope and peace, sounded almost resigned. He seemed to suggest that the country’s reckoning would have to happen without him.

Ian Crouch is a contributing writer and a member of The New Yorker’s editorial staff.

The murders in South Carolina were not random or merely tragic; they were pointedly racist; they were political.

As the years passed, Tom grew more entrenched in his homelessness. He was absorbed in lofty fantasies and private missions, aware of the basest necessities and the most transcendent abstractions, and almost nothing in between.